


Memento Mori

by allenabeille, Cactusepique



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Mentions of various other characters - Freeform, Non-Graphic Violence, lots of mentions of the Doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28925100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allenabeille/pseuds/allenabeille, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cactusepique/pseuds/Cactusepique
Summary: Missy's journey, from newly-regenerated Time Lady to the S8 finale.
Kudos: 7
Collections: Fiftieth Masterversary Big Bang





	Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed (do we say "betaed"?) by allenabeille who's also the artist illustrating the fic <3

The first thing they did, right after their regeneration — light-headed, skin still warm and tingly from being reborn anew, coughing up golden residual energy in fits — wasn’t to look for the Doctor.

Looking for the Doctor was, however, what every fibre of their being was telling them to do. Their mind was in shambles, but their first thoughts focused on their oldest friend and enemy. New lungs stretching out, old hearts rumbling. The Doctor was in danger. They were certain of it, and somehow, it was their fault. They didn’t know how or why, they just knew. It was the worst part of the dreadful mix of worry and guilt clenching at their hearts.

They had to find them, they had to help, they had to fix whatever happened. Nothing was impossible to them, they felt strong, unstoppable, incredible —like they could do anything. But there was a gaping hole in their recent memory, a problem they weren’t even sure would dissipate along with the fog of post-regeneration amnesia. Post-regeneration amnesia, what a messy thing. Potentially exhilarating and deeply terrifying. Deep down all it truly made you feel was raw and exposed: full of possibilities, yet hollow and at the same time incredibly light, instead of heavy with knowledge, memories and regrets. It made you want to run until your lungs were burning and aching. Until you would collapse, hearts hammering, too breathless to laugh but doing it anyway because in the end everything is always so stupidly funny.

Collapsed and shuddering on the ground, was exactly their current situation, their mind idly registered. Worse, it was raining. They pulled themselves up shakily, dirty knees and hands pushing against wet earth. Pastures of —thankfully— blue grass and wildflowers stretched across the horizon to snow-capped mountains under a clouded sky.

Anything but red. Anywhere but Gallifrey.

Their laughter echoed across the field. There was no one to hear it.

They were happy to be alive, happy they had the good sense to get out of their TARDIS before the big show happened. Regeneration in one’s Time machine was a bad idea. They were pretty sure the Doctor had done it once, or twice though. Or thrice. Or would do it in the future. It didn’t matter, they were an idiot. An idiot in danger. An enemy they wanted to rescue. A friend they had no idea where to look for.

Earth.

Earth was a good idea. The tiny, blue, human-overrun planet was always a good starting point if one wanted to find the Doctor. Except Earth wasn’t that tiny: not in size nor in time spent existing.

They stumbled back toward their TARDIS, struggling to stay upright in shoes that were clearly too big for their new body. Looking for the Doctor would have to wait, they told themselves —grinding their teeth, blinking hard against tears of rage. Hating the worry nagging at them, hating that they cared. Willing themselves to stop. Reminding themselves the Doctor was almost as smart as them. Nearly as ruthless when they needed to be.

Absolutely as good as survival as too.

They needed to think about themselves first. They could smell blood on themselves, and a shower and a change of clothes wouldn’t go amiss. A strong, fresh cup of tea was in order too, for the headache that was threatening to turn into a migraine attack. To lull the fear that the drums were coming back.

They had the tea first. A black, unflavoured blend, the first thing they had found in their kitchen pantry. Lots of sugar because they needed the high and unspoiled by milk because they had none.

They shed their dirty clothes, relics of a past life they were eager to cast off. Giving in to the temptation of smelling the blood —definitely theirs— they tried not to linger too long on how they had clearly died by being stabbed in the back. Who had done it? Why? How? Why the hell couldn’t they remember? They searched their pockets for anything useful (a laser screwdriver, a few more gadgets, a mirror and an eyeliner), then pushed the clothes in a corner to be burnt later. They kicked their shoes and socks off and stood naked on the cold floor tiles, trembling and soaked to the bones from the chilling rain.

One hand wrapped around their hot mug they ignored how cold they felt as they half-heartedly munch on some stale cookies (the only food they had found in the pantry). They slowly collected their thoughts, remembering the colony spaceship and the Cybermen. Long years of waiting alone, then with a kind, funny human whose name and face they had forgotten. The scary, beautiful lady in purple they promised to always, always carry a spare dematerialisation circuit to. A doctor whose face or voice they also couldn’t remember.

A Doctor who had pleaded with them.

They hadn’t listened nor cared.

Maybe they had.

They looked at themselves properly for the first time since they had woken up outside in the rain. Looked down to acknowledge and access the most interesting changes for the first time. Ran a hand through long, curly hair, stretched thinly muscular arms before them, stroke a finger along the path of a vein, from wrist to elbow and registered more very apparent veins, expanding like trees branches up a tight to a soft belly. Thought about blood, oxygen, life and destructive energy pulsing through them.  
They laughed.

They quietly thought “Mistress” for the first time under the hot spray of the shower —blood and dirt washing away down the drain at their feet, still trying hard to not think about being stabbed cowardly, but absolutely thinking of possible culprits and satisfactory vengeances — and felt it was right. Then they dried themselves in front of a full-length mirror and looked into icy blue eyes.

She.

Her.

Time Lady. Surely an improvement on Time Lord.

She used the eyeliner she had found earlier to make her gaze even more striking and sucked in a breath in amazement as she raised her chin up and admired her new sharp cheekbones. She was cutting a very fine silhouette.

Missy.

She decided to just embrace the change, to flung herself headlong into being a madwoman instead of a madman. It all felt good. So very good, like promises and new beginnings.

“Mistress, Mistress, Mistress,” she chanted, soft and hissing, as she discarded a few revealing dresses previously owned by Lucy.

“Missy”, she tried, shortening it on whim as she finally found a black dress, which might have belonged to the body who loved Nehru collars.

“Missy”, she said again. Again, again and again with every button she did as she dressed —there were many— and fell in love with the name.

She found a nice coat, too big for her, but still flattering, for it seemed this new body of hers could make anything work. The dress was in a thick, woollen fabric, falling all the way to her ankles —she still liked non-revealing, quite formal but striking outfits— and she decided tights and undergarments could wait. Finally, she put on heavy socks to accommodate a pair of worn leather boots one size too big. She couldn’t remember who used to own them, possibly someone who died, probably by her hands. She gave herself a long last appraising look in the mirror before heading to her console room. Her TARDIS hummed and sang under her new hands.

Freedom, she thought, after all this time.

Missy stood silently for several minutes, eyes closed, fingers barely ghosting over controls, her TARDIS console gently ticking in impatience. The cold hum of machinery filling her ears, she let the peace settle in and felt like she was going to explode with joy. Only then did she allow herself to think about the Doctor again.

She searched. Chased. Hunted. Flipped the universe around, upside down, and back in the right sense again in her quest, lifted secret veils and looked under scattered rocks few people knew about. Even considered looking in parallel universes. More worrying so, none of the Doctor she came across matched the vague memory she had of the one on the colony ship, they were all too young. Every time she found the Doctor one of her younger self was there too. The timelines were all wrong —jammed, twisted and criss-crossed— forcing her to leave before the subsequent migraine wrecked her mind apart. She kept looking, unable to scratch the feeling that the Doctor was in danger and that it was her doing. Something she had to fix urgently. A debt to be paid or a good deed to be done.

She searched to the point of exhaustion. Then she kept going until she had to stop and catch her breath —back against a dirty wall in a narrow street , a cold chill making her pull her coat tighter around a body that suddenly felt smaller. Her new, gorgeous hair was a beautiful annoyance, but she paid it little mind as she huffed and pushed curly locks away from her face.

A ripped “Vote Saxon” poster caught her eyes. She snorted and banged a fist against the wall.

Ultimately, she collapsed into a leather armchair in a dimly lighted café, enveloped in lovely warmth and the scent of coffee grounds. Somewhere expensive, a place where people talked in hushed whispers, waiters acted in a perfect balance between discreet and attentive and glasses were made of crystal. The menu was written in a language she was a bit rusty in, and it seemed her TARDIS translation circuit needed repairing. She welcomed the prospect of having to do some maintenance work with relief —almost joy. It would be fixed in a jiffy but would still be something to occupy her hands and her mind with for a shot moment. She’d always tended to get bored easily, something she shared with the Doctor. She ordered almost everything on the menu, and ate a tiny amount of everything, keener on discovering what her new tastes were than really hungry. She found she still had excellent taste, as expected. Savouring the last spoon of a panna cotta —flavoured with a hybrid fruit that managed to taste like fifteen different and distinct other fruits, all at the same time— she closed her eyes in exhaustion for a moment, briefly devoting all her attention to enjoying the music played on a nearby piano. She should learn to play the piano or improve her skills. She couldn’t remember if she were any good at it and after all it didn’t matter, she would never be too old to learn new tricks.

When she opened her eyes again, a woman was sitting in front of her.

“Missy,” the stranger said with a polite smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, “all fresh and new from the regeneration oven, I see”.

Missy tensed. Hearing the name she had chosen for herself being used by someone else for the first time sent warm tingles down the spine, but the stranger knowing her could only mean one thing: criss-crossing timelines.  
This could be a dangerous situation. Good —she needed some distraction from her unfruitful search for the Doctor.

“How do you even know?” Missy asked, reaching for her cup of coffee, discreetly smelling it for common poisons before taking a sip. “I’m not exuding regeneration energy all over the place anymore, am I?”

“There are still a few golden sparks in your eyes. It’s pretty,” the stranger replied, lifting a glass of something green and fizzy to her lips. “And you’re not yet as stylish as you’ll come to be in the future.”

Missy gave her a long, measuring look, unsure how she felt, emotional fickleness being a common side effect of a recent regeneration —probably annoyed. She smiled sweetly at the lady in front of her, debating what would be the most entertaining course of action: a little chat or a bloodshed.

“I’m Professor Song. Archaeologist.” the other helpfully supplied, cutting Missy thought process and sparing her the effort of asking. “I’m a friend of the Doctor’s.”

Missy gave her a dismissive wave of her hand. “The Doctor has loads of annoying, insignificant, silly little human friends, my dear. What do you want?”

“Oh, I’m a special one,” Song corrected, ignoring Missy’s withering look. “I won’t be long, I just wanted to give you this. A little something to think about.”

With that she rose from her seat and produced a small object from an inner pocket, depositing it carefully on an empty saucer. It was a large Victorian-style cameo brooch, depicting Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and spring. An ancient Love-Goddess, tied to fertility, sex and blossoming.

Missy picked it up gingerly, running her fingers other it, reacquainting herself with the once oh-so familiar creases of the shell, feeling her hearts rates pick up. She hadn’t seen it since a time long before she even started calling herself the Master. The Doctor gave it to her when her daughter…

“Where the hell did you get that?” she murmured.

But Song had already vanished from the café.

She parked her TARDIS on a desert planet and burnt her old-self clothes there, watching the fire roar in rapt fascination and wishing to blaze and burn too. Then she found an inhabited place, and set a whole village on fire just to see the pretty shapes the flames made —and bask in the distant sound of hundreds of voices screaming.

Pity the Doctor wasn’t there to watch in horror.

The Doctor was brooding atop a cloud in the early 1890s, his TARDIS poetically suspended high above London, accessible via a long hike up a spiralling staircase, on steps that never seemed to end. Good enough to discourage most people, baring perhaps the most curious and determined.

At last, she had found him.

This particular face was still too young to be the Doctor from the colony ship, both in actual age and in appearance, but he was older than all the other Doctors she had already met, so it counted as an improvement.  
Once she had located him, travelling up and down his personal timeline proved quite easy (for someone as gifted as her, of course). She spied on him in his past, just enough to understand what had pushed him into insolation, rolling her eyes at the whole River Song and Ponds business.

She settled in the London of 1892 for a while, finding her own cloud away from the human masses and the tiring hustle and bustle of the big city, grabbing a sturdy umbrella cane at a local shop, and promptly turning it into a teleportation device, allowing her to pop up and down from her cloud. Better than the Doctor’s stairs, which were dramatic and beautiful, but utterly impracticable.

Missy copied the Doctor’s outfit, Victorian vibes and hues of purple. Half as a terrible joke, half because she genuinely enjoyed her new “Evil Mary Poppins” look, as she liked to label it. She stopped short from putting on a bowtie (she bought several, but only wore them each a handful of times before storing them away), and instead went with a buttoned-up blouse on which she could pin the cameo brooch she hadn’t been able to part with ever since Song returned it to her.

She wondered if the Doctor would recognize it.

She wore chequered pants a few times, but soon discarded them for the freedom and warmth of a skirt and petticoats. Corsets offered a nice feeling of support and constriction, but she got hers custom-made in the twenty-seventh century; feather-light, most weapon-proof, marvellously supple and absolutely unbreakable; she tried, with every destructive means she could think of. Bigger on the inside storage improved it; for the dematerialisation circuit she had recently acquired, a few blades and cash money in a hundred of different currencies. As the day passed, she turned her outfits into armours. Even her brooch she fitted with dark star alloy; ready to go through a Dalek armour plating like a knife through people. Most importantly, she experimented with her hair, learning how to tame the “swamp hag styling” she woke up with on the first few days into a Victorian updo (she lost track of the number of hairpins she broke in the process), how to braid it for sleeping, and how to care for it —it involved a lot of brushing. She experimented with outrageous makeup.

Nightmares plagued her. Sleep wasn’t usually a big issue for Time Lords and Ladies, for they required so little of it to function, but she found that rest helped with her chronic headaches and migraines; consequences and permanent reminder of the hell the never ending, but now gone drums had put her through. It helped pass the time when she was too bored to do anything, but nightmares were a major downside. Flickers of faces and flashing images, her hands dripping with blood, burning fire and oppressive smoke. Daleks screeching, the electric hiss of their weaponry, but above all she dreamt of Cybermen, and of pleading clear eyes that might belong to the Doctor. She woke up shuddering, hand clasped over her hearts, fingers flexing over the expensive silk of her nightshirt. Every time she faced it as bravely as she could, breathing out slowly as the moment slips away gradually, waiting for the storm to pass. Then getting up, paddling bare feet into the corridors of her unending, solitary ship, needing to find something to occupy her hands with and knowing it would be days until she’d be able to find sleep again.

Every time she wished she weren’t alone.

She took up fencing again, to access her new body strength, let off some steam, empty her mind and work on her reflexes, happily going back to an old hobby of hers. Dressed in breaches and silky shirts, she threw her whole body in the battles, her mind raging and full of memories of her few fights with the Doctor. Maybe he could be convinced to fence with her. She could stab him into his next regeneration.  
Yet Missy vowed to never interact with him. They weren’t meant for each other; she could feel it. He was meant to be, oddly and sadly enough, a “Master-less Doctor”, for lack of any better term, but she couldn’t let him stay like this forever, alone and miserable on his cloud.

Her friend needed a new human pet, and she was going to give one to him.

That was how the Nethersphere started out.

Missy wasn’t going to just pick any random human and hope they’d be a good companion for the Doctor. No, she wanted to choose the human scientifically, while still avoiding running headfirst into a bootstrap paradox and choosing someone because she had already chosen them; something she circumvented by keeping herself in the dark and setting her analytical tools to ignore all link they would found between the Doctor and a specific human. Her Nethersphere was a testament to how smart and ambitious she was, originally a database of all the Earthlings who lived and died on Earth for three centuries (a trial period from 1800 to 2100), then expanded to a collection of human souls from almost all of time and space.

Naturally, it escalated into a mad project to defeat death itself and secure immortality for herself, and potentially a few chosen ones —which mainly meant the Doctor. Humanity didn’t need immortality and should even be kept from achieving it. They were an invasive species, expanding as their sciences and societies evolved, only set back by their greed, their proneness to war and genocide, their fragile bodies, vulnerable immune systems and ridiculously short lifespans. Many needed to die everyday as many new ones were born.

Building her Gallifreyan hard drive proved an exciting, if at times frustrating, challenge. Her talents at engineering didn’t change the fact that she needed specific parts that she couldn’t get, because someone —she didn’t have to investigate to know it was the Doctor— had foolishly sealed the manufacturers in a pocket universe. She wasn’t complaining too hard about it though. After all, it had saved her life.

What she really needed was a data slice from the Matrix. Hacking into the High Council’s supercomputer had always been something she wanted to do, to get lost inside and ransack it for knowledge, to find out more about what they had done to her —and certainly other Gallifreyan children. She hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet and refused to accept it might be fear that was holding her back.  
Besides, she would really love to go back to Gallifrey for the first time as Missy with the Doctor holding her hand. They could run together under the two suns and lie side by side in soft red grass like they used to do and reminisce about the past and how better they were in loving each other.

Then they could burn the Capitol to the ground together.

She didn’t need a Matrix data slice, she told herself. She wasn’t more evil than the High Council, no matter what they wanted to believe for themselves, but she was smarter, craftier and more resourceful. If stealing a Gallifreyan hard drive wasn’t an option, she would build one herself from scratch.

The important thing one needed to understand about transdimensional engineering, was that it wasn’t just bigger on the inside, but also “fuller” on the inside, although if correctly done the end result wasn’t cramped and heavy, but spacious and light. TARDISes weighed more than most planets and yet less than an average linen closet; the full weight of the interior could not be felt from the exterior. Otherwise, the Doctor wouldn’t be able to land on Earth without crushing the poor planet and its people…which, Missy thought, would be atrociously funny if it were to happen. Fuller on the inside meant that the amount of hardware she needed to build one tiny data slice was overwhelming.

It didn’t stop her. She went deep into her TARDIS’s guts, wrenching panels and doors opened, picking up pieces of Gallifreyan technology to study and reverse engineer. Unspooling enormous balls of cables like an angry cat, figuring out what segments her TARDIS could do without, then marching back into her workshop, hands clutched victoriously around fistful of translucent cable —high quality Gallifreyan optic fibre.  
Hours of work stretched into days, then into weeks and months, but she never gave up. She worked tirelessly; sleeves rolled past her elbows, constantly tucking curls of hair that had slipped free from her messy updo neatly back behind her ears. Sweaty, a touch greasy and rough around the edges, but oh-so determined and enjoying herself. When it was needed she wore a welding apron and helmet but found gloves to be cumbersome to do fine work with, which resulted in burnt fingertips and scars on her wrists and forearms. She didn’t mind them —they gave character to her otherwise unscathed, too-smooth new skin. They were proof of how hard she worked.

One day she found Sebastian, an artificial intelligence —Seb the AI, for short— sleeping in an external hard drive, abandoned in a cluttered drawer of her main workshops. She had ten workshops; three for her regular engineering and computer science, one for woodworking, one for glassblowing and another one for painting. She couldn’t remember what the others were for, she hadn’t visited them in a very long time, but she had the feeling there was one for sewing or for pottery.

She couldn’t remember either why she had made Sebastian in the first place, or even when. It must have been on a very boring day of her long life. Oddly enough, she did remember she had made him Sebastian.

“Mum?” was the AI’s first word as he woke up. He jolted and yelped, blinking up as her in confusion. Then, having expressed his emotion as a human would, he calmed down eerily, a soft, empty smile floating on his face. Interesting. She had apparently created him to resemble humans. It immediately made her think he might make a good carer for her little collection of digitized human souls.

“I’m not your mum and you damn well know it,” she chided, her expression completely blank. “You don’t have a mummy, Sebbie, I’ve made you. But you already know all that, don’t you? You’ve been quietly updating yourself as you’ve slept all these years, and gotten quite clever, haven’t you?

She leaned forward, lacing her fingers in front of her in a thoughtful pose. “And if you’re ready to be a good little tool to your Mistress, I might have just the job for you.”

“Clara Oswald,” Seb said from behind Missy as she lounges on her desk chair, spying through her tablet at the girl she had set her mind on as her gift for the Doctor —a girl who was currently busy eating cereals for breakfast, eyes heavy and not bothering to stiff her many yawns. She had chosen her because somehow, in the grand, complicated scheme of things, she would one day be a Dalek but would mostly keep her sanity. Astonishing. “Born on the 23rd of November, 1986, in Blackpool, Lancashire, United-Kingdom, Earth. Nanny. Aspiring teacher. Orphan on her mother's side. Single. Entirely unremarkable. Seriously, you could do better.”

“She’s not for me, you moron,” Missy retorted. “She’s for a friend. He’ll show her the universe and put stars in her eyes, and she’ll be a good manic pixie dream girl and cheer him up. The Doctor is very, very depressed right now. I can’t work with him depressed. It’s no fun.”

She typed a few lines of code on her computer, spined on her chair to face Seb, smiling toothily.

“And when he feels happy, safe and comfortable I’ll show up with a big surprise.”

“What surprise?”

“Oh Seb, my dear Seb, I don’t know yet,” Missy said lightly. “I’ll figure it out. Something good. Something spectacular.”

She briefly contemplated taking the girl —Clara, Clara, Clara, sweet, puppy-eyed Clara— for a spin, embarking her on a small adventure and wiping her mind afterwards, but she had sure tastes and felt confidence in her choice; it would be a waste of time.

Sometimes the best plans were the simplest, so Missy decided to just give the girl the Doctor’s number. She considered hypnotising the girl into calling the Doctor, or even joining her in one of the bars she frequented, seducing her —she was a bit out of practice at flirting, but this could be fun!— and giving her the Doctor’s number instead of her own, but ultimately decided as more discreet, unremarkable approach was best.

“Just phone a computer helpline, love,” she said, sickly sweet, as she wrote the Doctor’s number down for the girl, the polish on her nails hiding the blood underneath. The shop owner had shown an unexpected natural resistance to hypnotism, so murder had logically been her next move (oh, how they had begged when they had felt the knife on their throat).

Her first kill in this body —how lovely.

“Here, best helpline in the universe.”

Missy smiled as she watched her girl go, red fingers drumming softly (not her drums rhythm, thankfully it was a thing of the past) against the counter.

The true key to immortality was childishly simple when one stopped to think about it. It could be summed up in four words: make copies of yourself.

Most teleport manufacturers never thought about it at length, but all teleports functioned by turning matter into a stack of data, then back into matter. Data that could be saved, stored, edited and rearranged at will, then reuploaded into the real, tangible world. Teleportation meant potential instant resurrection; not exactly immortality, but the next best thing. Her teleport bracelet was a reassuring weight on her wrist, programmed to download her automatically into her Nethersphere in the event of her death or in case of major injuries, a handy device she quickly became addicted to —popping up into the Nethersphere, fiddling with the data controlling her appearance or her level of energy, and popping back to the real world well rested, wearing a new outfit, hair and make-up perfect again.

“Could you upload me to the real world?”, Seb once asked. “Make me a real person? ‘Could be fun.”

“Who exactly do you think I am, Pinocchio’s blue fairy?” Missy asked with a toothy smile. “Now be a dear and magic me some tea. Shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds, and do try to be a bit more creative than last time; unflavoured black is boring.”

Missy kept a watchful eye on the Doctor, as well as on her Clara, of course. The girl proved herself a good companion, even if Missy had to roll her eyes at yet another human who couldn’t simply enjoy her time with the Doctor while it lasted but had to turn herself into the stuff of legend. She saw him saving Gallifrey —and herself, the most delightful of collateral damage to the Time Lords survival.

“Look at my beautiful idiot,” she said to Seb, who, absorbed with a Rubik’s cube, wasn’t listening.

She skipped most of the Doctor’s time on Trenzalore though. It was dreadfully boring, except for the end. The Doctor getting gifted a whole new package of twelfth regenerations seemed like cheating to her —she had yet to figure out how to include more regenerations for herself in her immortality plans— but oh did she love his new face. He looked around the same age as her by twenty-first century Earthling standards, he too had striking clear eyes, and even a Scottish accent to match hers. And oh, how angry and harsh he was. He was beautiful. If Missy wasn’t one to believe in fate, she had a certain fondness for fortunate coincidences like this: they matched like two sides of the same coin. They looked made for each other, as they should.

The dead outnumbered the living. This was true for most species, even Time Lords, and humans weren’t an exception. Missy had read Arthur Clarke's Space Odyssey a few regenerations ago, but his assertion had stayed with her: “Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” Clarke had published his book in 1968, and by then he might have been true…but with humanity’s hight rate of population growth, Missy knew the dead- to -living ratio was bound to be even lower in the mid-2010s (she had calculated it was the point in Time hers and the Doctor’s timelines were most likely to cross again). Nevertheless, Missy spent a lot of time dwelling on the quite sizable army that was her collection of human souls in the Nethersphere. The dead-to-living ratio mattered very little if you could instantly weaponize any new dead added to the rank. Her army would be undefeatable.

She needed a new “World Domination” plan to impress the Doctor with.

She briefly considered resurrecting them all to Earth —spreading joy and excitement as people would be reunited with deceased loved-one or get to meet the historical figures they obsessed about, but also chaos and mayhem as humans from the past would struggle to fit into modern society and overpopulation would quickly lead to civil war. Then the most perfect plan came to her as she had yet another dream about Cybermen. Cyber-conversion. A whole army of emotionless, obedient soldiers. An army she could use for herself…or even better, gift to the Doctor. He had always wanted to go right every wrong in the universe, and this could let him!.

It was a perfect, beautiful plan.

After all, Missy had always loved her humans stuffed into tin cans —first her beloved Toclafane, now Cybermen.

Figuring out how to cyber-convert corpses, and how to do it on a global scale in a short time (she aimed for less than an hour), was no little accomplishment. Working with cyber-pollen was highly dangerous and cadavers were gross and disturbing —for all of Missy’s love for destruction, she wasn’t a huge fan of eerie stillness and glassy eyes. She first collected pollen from deactivated Cybermen, but they proved ineffective. Then she almost got killed while collecting pollen from an activated, but subdued robot. The pollens needed living matter to work its magic, and it did well enough on fresh-corpses with some minor alterations from her part —the human long gone, soul stored in the Nethersphere, but the body swarming with bacterial and pest activity. Long-dead bodies, like skeletons, were another challenge.

Missy started small but made the mistake to think warzones were the most convenient places to discreetly get her hands on fresh bodies —and to think she could handle them without it triggering visions of the Time War. She had beheld a lot of horrific sights in her long life, but the devastated landscapes of the Great War no man’s lands still managed to make her hands shake. Some of the bodies she tried to pick up turned out to be still alive, young and older men grasping her arms or the hem of her skirt, babbling in broken voices, begging for help with words she didn’t need her TARDIS translation circuits to identify as German, French, English…  
She had half a mind to kill them. For mercy’s sake, or simply to make them shut up. Humans. Greatest monsters of them all.

Angry with her own weakness, she visited a few more battlefields, and even a Soviet Gulag, but they all turned her stomach. She convinced herself body-snatching in graveyards was just easier, but digging bodies up was hard work, and not particularly funny or enjoyable. Missy resorted to killing —that, she liked, and the corpses were as fresh as could be. Strangely enough she didn’t kill randomly, but targeted people the Doctor himself would have labelled as evil. She didn’t quite know herself why she did it. Sometimes she had the most disturbing urges to do…not exactly good, but not the worst thing either.

She wasn’t going soft because she was a woman; she wanted that on record. But maybe, after all these long years, she was changing a bit…not for other people’s sake (the only other person she cared about was the Doctor, and even him couldn’t redeem her), but for herself. She didn’t need all of planet Earth’s cemeteries to be erupting with Cybermen, she just needed the Doctor and his dear humans to think it was the case —massive panicking was highly entertaining, and she had standards to maintain. It wouldn’t do for them to think she was only doing the bare minimum.

Still, she only needed Cybermen to crawl out of tombs in all the graveyards of the United Kingdom, and in a few ones in Europe, North America and commonwealth countries and she was sure it would be enough for UNIT and the Doctor to see it as a worldwide crisis. In truth Missy had visited many cemeteries she wasn’t keen on damaging (they were so aesthetically pleasing), even for the greater good. In the end all she needed was a small sample of a few dozen Cybermen to present to the Doctor, and if he’d want more, she’d happily provide them.

She still worked on converting skeletons, if for nothing else just for the love of science. When her carefully crafted very own pollen managed to turn the remains of a Roman soldier from the Gallic Wars she cracked a bottle of sparkling golden-tinted wine with a sword (she loved being over-the-top) and raised a glass to herself in the privacy of her laboratory. She had done it. The Doctor would be astonished, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit proud.

More often than not, spying on the Doctor made her feel sad. It took Missy a lot of courage to admit to herself she was lonely. Seb the AI was witty, sarcastic and cruel —and a true delight to watch interact with recently deceased humans. His shows of compassion were so obviously weird and hypocritical — but she still saw him as no more than a tool. A tool she would get rid of —she had made herself a nice little disintegrator, for all her killing needs that didn’t require the body of her victim— once she wouldn’t need him anymore, or if he ever pushed her buttons too hard.

She started having tea with some of the poor soul crammed in her fake Heaven, even going as far as to welcome some of them herself into her Afterlife. Quite a nice fake Heaven anyone would say; they had gardens, forests, beaches, and all kinds of amenities and accommodations. She wasn’t an absolute monster; her humans were comfortable, even pampered, but gently urged to relinquish their human emotions. It made life in the afterlife easier for them, and cyber-conversion easier for her. A win-win situation.

Missy really enjoyed playing God.

Dictators, serial-killers, domestic-abusers and genocidal maniacs proved themselves incredibly boring. Human evilness was, if awful in its reality and consequences, very unremarkable —their hatred and propensity to violence terribly banal, common and unsurprising. She met many artists and thinkers, but they quickly overwhelmed her with all their ideas and musings. Humans weren’t supposed to think that much, were they?  
She reunited several times with Jack Harkness, who hit on both her and Seb, but never got to stay long enough to figure out who she was. Jenny Flint who didn’t stay long on her first visit —having been revived— but became Missy’s favourite fencing opponent when she died for good. She met the Ponds, boring (as expected) and still very much in love. Sadly, she never got to meet River Song again. Amazingly enough, the woman had been uploaded to another soul-storing mega drive.

None of her efforts at socializing managed to make her feel better. Which made sense: Humans were beneath her, and she couldn’t even fathom seeing any of them as a friend.

She needed a friend.

No, not any friend: her best friend. The only other Time Lord currently alive outside of Gallifrey’s pocket universe.

Missy didn’t quite know what kept her from launching her “Cybermen Army gift for the Doctor” plan right away. Something was missing; she wanted a dramatic introduction, an intensity deliciously building up slowly to a great, thundering reveal. She wanted the Doctor to find her trail, to pick up clues along his way and became increasingly suspicious and alarmed, and for her to be able to watch him and reveal in it all, wondering how long it will take him to figure it all out.

As luck would have him, that was when Seb insisted she meet someone he had just greeted in the Nethersphere: Doctor Skarosa.

Skarosa had already met her because he immediately recognised her as his killer —Missy delighted in telling him exactly how telling her this was binding her to become his killer in his past and her future, bootstrap paradoxes were funny like that.

Skarosa was also a stubborn idiot with a silly theory about death.

Missy was idly roaming the halls of her 3W Institute. She stopped by Skarosa’s tomb, staring into the hollow orbits of Skarosa’s skull as she reminisced about the past few months.

She had a lot of fun being the boss of 3W. Skarosa certainly thought outside of the box, but never managed to convince anyone else his ideas could be right. He really should have thanked her. After all, she had made quite a business out of his Afterlife theory, and she had been kind enough to honour his memory by keeping his name as the official founder of 3W. Doctor Skarosa was a name worthy of a comic book villain; it was hard to resist using it. Scamming rich people into making fancy funeral arrangements had been a piece of cake. Their money had made her richer than she already was, and their bodies in their dark water tanks provided her with the dramatic setting she’d dreamt of to welcome the Doctor.

A few weeks ago, she anonymously tipped UNIT off about 3W’s activities, hoping to draw the Doctor’s attention. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and her team had walked from an innocuous office in an unremarkable building in a suburb to the transdimensional engineered halls of 3W hidden inside Saint Paul’s Cathedral without batting an eye or noticing they had completely moved. Missy had watched from afar as Doctor Chang had guided them and answered their question, feeling disappointed that Lethbridge-Stewart wasn’t sporting a moustache —in Missy’s opinion, the moustache held half of the Brigadier’s legacy.

Doctor Chang was a nice employee, Missy was quite proud of herself for choosing him. He was a legit, PDH-equipped Doctor, too happy to be given interesting work to do —and a generous paycheck— to stop and question the morality of it all. Missy was almost sad he would be dead soon (by her hand, of course; she liked him too much to let him go about his life without her), but the whole 3W chapter of her life was coming to an end…because the Doctor was coming.

Just when Missy had been ruminating the failed UNIT inspection and thinking about other ingenious ways to set the Doctor on her trail, another lucky coincidence had happened: Clara’s boyfriend had died and been uploaded to the Nethersphere…just in time for the Doctor’s birthday (Missy had made the most complex calculations to convert the Gallifreyan date into an Earth one, she was pretty proud of herself, for her margin of error was of only nine hours).

Missy had watched enthralled, as her Clara had betrayed the Doctor’s trust and as he, ever forgiving, had still agreed to help her find Danny. Then, when Danny had died three days before the Doctor’s birthday, she had made sure the Doctor’s TARDIS would only be able to land in the 3W facilities on the precise date she wanted.

Everything was ready.

Well, not everything. She hadn’t decided yet how exactly she would introduce herself to the Doctor, but she figured a bit of spontaneity wouldn’t hurt. She would figure it out as things happened.  
She heard the tell tale sound of the Doctor’s TARDIS landing in the entrance lobby, below the gallery she was standing in.

Missy was ready.

The show could begin.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are always appreciated ;)
> 
> [note from the artist: illustration is to be added soon!!]


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